Comments: There’s a type of heroine whose-virtue-is-in-danger story that goes all the way back to the penny dreadfuls and beyond, which was read eagerly back in that era by silly lower-class women with weak minds and erratic, hysterical, and suspicious temperaments.
Unhappily, as the great middle-class expansion grew in the 20th century, the descendants of these women have followed their men up the social ladder into middle-class jobs, but they continue to have the same silly, half-witted peasant-cum-cornerstore-shopgirl emotional mindset despite their improved education, and they eat that sort of narrative up. You can’t make an inherently silly woman sensible and stable.
* There used to be a warning in the Victorian era about women “who read French novels.” It was considered a sign of madness and/or bad wife material. It’s laughed about now, but I think they were on to something: the same women who would have indulged in penny dreadful romances then would be watching marathons these days of SVU and other rape-fantasies-in-cop-procedural-format.
Enter the Donald’s accusers. Whether their stories are true, as they claim, or not, as he says, does not interest me here. What I do find strange is that, after decades and decades during which the females of the species have been “empowered” in every possible way, the women in question still did not have what it takes to give him what, according to them, he deserved. So dumb are some of them that, at the time, they do not even understand they have been “harassed” or “abused.” Or so they claim.
Miserable creatures! Like snakes in the grass, they spent years and even decades nursing their grievances, real, imagined, or simply invented for the occasion. And waiting for a suitable opportunity. Only then, and only when they had their behinds protected by the likes of the New York Times, did they finally crawl out of their hiding places, screwed up their “courage,” went public, and injected their venom into the presidential race. Or was it just greed and the wish for the fifteen minutes of fame?
And what does going public mean? Whining, of course. About how unable to help themselves they felt. About how humiliating the experience was. About the deep and lasting psychological damage they suffered, the psychotherapy they needed, the compensation they deserved, and so on. If these and other women who come up with similar claims are lying, then they are pathetic. If they are telling the truth, then in some ways they are even more pathetic.
As to what to think of an electorate, now made up mostly of women, that in today’s dangerous world is only interested in what happens from the waist down, make up your own mind.
